The D2Z Podcast

The Evolution of Video Production with AI - 133

• Brandon Amoroso • Episode 133

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What if you could transform your entire video production process with just your smartphone and the power of AI? That's exactly what Amer Tedayon, the innovative founder and CEO of LusaHub, is bringing to businesses worldwide. In this episode, we explore Amer's fascinating career journey from computer science and filmmaking to revolutionizing corporate video production. Discover how LusaHub empowers businesses with tight budgets and time constraints to create fast, high-quality video content. Amer shares his insights on the importance of aligning with the right investors and team members, and how these choices impact the success of any venture.

Join us as we delve into the challenges of building a thriving remote company culture, particularly in an ever-evolving industry like AI. Amer offers strategies on fostering community among geographically dispersed teams through creative tools and how empowering employees can lead to organizational growth. We also discuss the strategic shift at LusaHub towards scaling sales operations and the role of AI in enhancing efficiency, leading to the development of the new Creative Copilot feature. This episode is packed with valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and business leaders looking to navigate the complexities of remote work and technological innovation.

Here's what you'll learn:
💰 Identifying the right market segment is crucial for startup success.
❗ Lucihub democratizes video production by enabling clients to film on smartphones.
🚀 Building a remote culture requires intentional engagement and communication.
💼 Empowering team members to make decisions fosters a proactive work environment.
🚀 Hiring the right people is essential for scaling a startup effectively.
🤖 AI tools can significantly enhance video production and marketing efficiency, but the balance between AI and human creativity is vital in video production.
📈 Sales strategies must adapt to the evolving landscape of technology and consumer needs.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to the Gen Z Mindset and AI in Video Production
02:31 Amer's Journey: From Software to Filmmaking
05:30 The Evolution of Video Production: Democratizing Access
09:01 Building a Remote Culture: Challenges and Strategies
11:31 Empowering Teams: Decision-Making and Leadership
14:51 Hiring Strategies: Scaling a Startup
18:08 Leveraging AI for Sales and Marketing Efficiency
22:11 The Future of Video Production: AI and Human Collaboration

Amer Tadayon
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amertadayon/
Lucihub - https://lucihub.com/

Brandon Amoroso:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/
Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/
X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon
Scalis.ai - https://scalis.ai/

Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, former founder of Electra and now the co-founder of Scaleless, and today I'm talking with Amer Tedayon, who's the founder and CEO at LusaHub, which is an award-winning AI-powered video production platform and mobile app. Thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 2:

Hey, thanks for having me, brandon, good to be here.

Speaker 1:

So before we jump into things, can you give everybody just a sort of a quick background on your career journey and how you got into this current business?

Speaker 2:

Sure, I guess you could see I'm a jack of all trades. I studied computer science and human factors and I was in the software industry for a long time and then I decided to go become a filmmaker, and in between that I was actually working for a couple of consulting firms Cognizant and Frog Design and this particular business is kind of connecting the dots with all of them. So it's technology, it's people and it's the video production industry.

Speaker 1:

That is definitely a wide array of experiences. Yeah, what was the moment where you decided you were going to start this current company?

Speaker 2:

So I actually I'm also a musician and I live in Vegas and I sold my last company in 2020 and I'd had my earn out and I was going to take a year off and play music and I was working on a production for an agency client, literally producing music, and she said you know, I wish you knew production. We spend thousands of dollars on video and by the time we get it back it's irrelevant. And that kind of just sparked an idea. That was on a Friday and that, following Monday, I started Lucy Hub, and the idea really is how do you use tech and people or people in tech to deliver high quality videos at speed and scale?

Speaker 1:

And so that's really what we set out to do and scale, and so that's really what we set out to do, and entering into this space because it isn't one that you had been in before, like for founders who are thinking about breaking into, you know, like a net new vertical, you know per se, obviously you had, you know, some experience and obviously previous experience as a founder. What were some of the things that you did, aside from the actual product ideation and development, but more on, like the you know, the go-to-market side of things.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a really good question. So one of the things we looked at I did own a digital studio years ago and we did a lot of production. We did work for MTV and some other folks. This time around, I looked at the market segments and I looked at who really had a need for this, and we actually went after multiple customer profiles to see where we would land. We started in weddings, we did events, we worked with production companies, we worked with different departments inside of enterprises, and what we realized is the people who really need this product have a lot on their plate and they don't have much time, and so, after about a year of testing different markets, we set on the fact that we're going to mostly do videos for corporate. So Microsoft is a client, cbre is a client. We have a bunch of corporate clients who have demands for video, but budgets are tight and time is tight, and so they're the ones we serve the most, and so we're really a business to business product.

Speaker 1:

And are these videos that they're creating? What does the end product actually look like? Are they explainer, tutorial videos? What types of content are being generated with your platform?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, great question. So one of the things that we do differently is, I would say we're really a hybrid platform. You know, prior to Lucy Hub, you had two options you could hire a production team and they would do everything for you, or you could use one of many DIY tools out there, but you have to put in the time to actually capture the content and do all the editing. So what we did was we leaned into the smartphone. So our clients mostly film on phones, they upload to the Lucy Hub Cloud and then a professional edit team takes over and we use a bunch of AI tools that we've built internally and externally and we turn around edits literally within hours. So last month we turned around 18 videos for a client in 16 hours.

Speaker 1:

That is a very quick time to turn around.

Speaker 2:

They range everything from explainer videos to CEO stories, to employee stories, to customer testimonials, to just event sizzles from a conference. You know, prior to us we had some clients that would pay a lot of money to bring a videography team in just to capture an event. And now the team does it themselves. And what's really cool is they'll have multiple team members film on a phone, upload to us the next morning. They'll have the video and they'll be able to share that they're at a trade show and push traffic their way.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and video is such a more engaging form of content than anything else, especially some of that bite sized pieces of content that you can share on social and whatnot.

Speaker 2:

It is, and the challenge, brandon, is that the demand for video has changed, the consumption has increased, but the way professional video is being done hasn't really changed much at all, and so what we're trying to do is basically democratize that so anybody can get professional content back quickly.

Speaker 1:

What are some of the key learnings that you took away from your previous businesses when you were starting this new one, where you're like? You know I'm not going to make that mistake again.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's quite a few. Actually, I think two really important ones. One is there's such a thing as bad money. Not all money is the right money, and so really evaluate who you're raising capital with, because if you pick the wrong team, you could lose everything as a founder. So that's one big lesson that I'm applying this time. And then the other one is don't put the wrong people in the wrong seats. So what I mean by that is we all have maybe a friend that we think might be a good fit, or you just want to help somebody out, and so you bring them and say, well, you could do this, even though they've never done it before. Or, you know, you might just want to be helping somebody out. It's typically a bad idea. You need to treat it like a business and put the right people in the right seats.

Speaker 1:

I yeah, especially on your latter point, I feel like you try to do something good in nature and then it ends up being more harmful to both parties than if you had just said no from the get-go.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, spot on. You know what's the thing no good deed goes unpunished. Yes, exactly, those are two really big lessons I'm applying on this one and just making sure the right people are in the right roles.

Speaker 1:

Are you all fully remote or hybrid or what's like the structure?

Speaker 2:

We're fully remote. This is the second company I've had that's been fully remote and the last one I actually started in 2015, well before the pandemic. But there are a lot of benefits from being fully remote. You have to find the right people. I actually had people come to me and leave saying they can't do this because their days bleed into their nights and their family life gets impacted. So I think you need to have the right type of person.

Speaker 2:

But if you hire motivated individuals who are driven it doesn't matter where they are right, we manage by objective. You have a bunch of tasks to accomplish are driven, it doesn't matter where they are right. We manage by objective. You have a bunch of tasks to accomplish. You have to accomplish it. So with this company, we were two things by design, global by design and AI by design, so it's in our DNA. The last company was an agency that I had, and same thing there, we had people all over the world, and one of the cool things about being remote is it doesn't limit your talent pool. You don't have to look at a 20 mile radius or a 30 mile radius. You've got the entire globe to choose from, and so I think that's really one of the benefits, and the other is you can weed out the guys who aren't performing, because it's not about how much time you're putting in an office, it's about how much output you're actually giving.

Speaker 1:

And that's measurable. You can actually see that work. So this company is remote. How do you handle the building of culture when it is that fully remote environment? Because that's something that I've found to be more difficult than when you're in the pit with everybody and getting that one-to-one interaction and going to dinner afterwards and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:

That's a great question, I think. So what we do, even geographically, we'll pull teams together from time to time. So you know teams, even in other countries. We'll make sure they're in a room together from time to time and they're interacting with each other. But globally and remotely, we do engage in doing things other than work and we'll have, you know, we have these once a month all-hand calls where we actually talk to people about what they do outside of work.

Speaker 2:

We're a video production platform so we actually use our video to highlight what everybody does, on Taco Tuesday, for example, and we all laugh about it. We all get on a call and look at the video like, oh, look at where he was or where she was. So we've got to actually leverage our own tool to help build culture remotely by creating videos that are engaging our employees as well. It is challenging. I think it goes back to if you hire the right people and you treat them right, you can still build the culture. It's a lot harder but you can still do it. We have a great team. They're all really dedicated to the project and the business. They all get along really well and even though they're remote, you just feel there's a camaraderie to it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think the team is even more critical in that fully remote environment, in that fully remote environment. And you know it's easier to hide in a remote environment at a larger organization than I think it is in a non-remote.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. Well, even with a smaller organization, you can't hide. At Lucy Hub, everybody's got something to work with you. You can't hide. But I do think this notion of culture starts at the top and I think if you treat your team the right way, I think you're going to innately get this team and this collaboration. That's really hard to do.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think people tend to overcomplicate things that really are more simple in nature than we might want to think that they are, and I think culture is one of them.

Speaker 2:

I agree, I agree, and it's probably one of the most important and it's often overlooked.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, when it comes to you know the things that you're most excited about in the industry as a whole. You know, in this advent of AI era where it feels like everything is changing every week, you know how do you build into your business the ability to you know sort of quickly pivot and iterate as new things are coming to market.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's boy. You have a lot of good questions. That one's a pretty important one for me, Brandon, because we're constantly pivoting here and I think at the root of it is enabling your team to make decisions. I have a saying I say to the guys all the time I said hey, I'd rather you beg forgiveness than ask permission. If you think something needs to change, make the change, and if it doesn't work, then we'll go back to it. But I really empower the team to make really hard decisions so that I'm not a bottleneck, or so the CTO is not a bottleneck or the head of marketing isn't a bottleneck. So that's one thing we've done. One of our, you know, one of our. What is it? Our key term? But we always tell everybody you have to be a leader, it doesn't matter what role you have, you have to make decisions.

Speaker 2:

That a leader would make if it's going to help the company. So that's one of the ways we do it, and we just had a call this morning. We had to make a couple of decisions and make some changes. That decision, those conversations, happen weekly here. In fact, sometimes they happen daily. We have the platform consists of three things. It's an entire set of promptless AI tools that'll act as a creative director, so you can do scripts, voiceovers, shot lists, everything. Then we have the production platform, which is actually video production tool set. You can upload all your content. You can actually collaborate with your teammates on the revisions, and then we have the team that delivers it, and the AI piece of this is constantly changing, and so what we're always looking at is saying what do our clients need today? How can we help them solve their problems? And so we made some changes this morning around the voiceover studio that we're announcing next week. But we have to be open to it and you have to be nimble.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think the empowerment of the team is an extension of the culture and is critical to being in an environment where people are actually bought. Important for me to make sure that they felt comfortable in their own right with the power that they have to make change and to make an impact on the organization, because people can be a little bit skittish about coming out and saying things and making themselves heard when maybe they you know that 20 years of experience or something to lean back on.

Speaker 2:

Well, but I'll tell you what. We have some people with 20 years of experience who I think they've just had some bad managers and you know I tell them hey, this is like, this is your domain, go do it, don't, don't worry about it. If it doesn't work, we'll fix it. I don't think they're used to that. I think, unfortunately, there's a lot of bad managers out there who want their thumbprint on everything that gets done in their organization or on their team, and we just don't function that way. We get together once a week, we talk about what direction the ship is going in. Everybody has a role and then departmentally, they have their check-ins and they do their work, but everybody here is empowered to deliver and not worry about the consequences. I'm never going to come down on them if we mess up. We just right the ship if we mess up.

Speaker 1:

How do you decide what types of roles you need to hire for and when? Because you're obviously a new company, you're growing. In an ideal world, you would probably get to hire 100 employees tomorrow and you do 10 different things that are floating around in your head. But how do you, you know, bring that in and make some key strategic bets, not only on the things that you're pursuing, but the team that needs to be in place to pursue this?

Speaker 2:

So I look at the audience really, what do we need to build? Who do we need to build it for? And I back into that. You know we're a product business first. That's kind of how we started, right. We started building some technology and so we have a pretty big product team. We have people on the AI side, we have people on the server side, we have people on the product side. So we spent the first year and a half really focused on finding building something that we thought people could use, and then we spent the second year testing it in multiple markets. So we're a little over two and a half years in.

Speaker 2:

I feel like we're just finding our stride, and so now it's okay, we found our stride. You know, our customers are really our core customers are really the enterprise and their HR departments and marketing teams and comms teams. So now the next level of hire is how do we scale that? And so our big next push is for salespeople. I think we've got a good grasp of the product. We've got a core customer set that's using it, giving us great feedback. They're renewing subscriptions, so we know we're doing something right. Now it's how do you scale feedback? They're renewing subscriptions, so we know we're doing something right Now.

Speaker 1:

it's how do you scale when it comes to sales? Have you been doing like founder, led sales up until this point, and now you're looking to delegate that off?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, actually up until this point, I think I've closed almost every deal in this company and we just started bringing in salespeople and the good news for them is now they have reference clients, case studies, testimonials, all the stuff they need to really run 100 miles an hour, but it has been founder-led sales and I think you know, if you want to, this is my belief. I think if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, go carry a bag as a salesperson for a few years because you're going to need it.

Speaker 1:

Go carry a bag as a salesperson for a few years, because you're going to need it. Yeah, I mean, that's the most important part I would argue to to any, to any business, because there's so many awesome ideas or products that have died because they can't get a distribution and there's products that maybe aren't as good that we are living and interacting with as we speak right now, because they had a better handle on how to get that distribution and get the scale that was needed on the sales side. Well, even in our business.

Speaker 2:

I look at some of our competitors that are on the full production side or the full DIY side, and there's a lot of misleading messages, there's a lot of noise that I have to overcome. We actually have a product that delivers what we say it delivers, and we have to fight across a lot of products that fall short. But they sell a message and that message is enough for someone to write a check and they say, well, we don't like this product, but we already spent money on it, so you'll have to come back next year. So that's one of the challenges. But yeah, that it. So you'll have to come back next year.

Speaker 1:

So that's, that's one of the challenges. But yeah, that is my favorite thing to hear as a as a salesperson, but that's why it's so important to continue to do it like the. A mistake I made early on with the the agency was, you know would spend so much time prospecting and getting sales meetings booked, but then my attention would go towards, you know, all of the calls and getting those people through the pipeline and getting them sold. But then once that was done, then I was left again with a lag where there wasn't meetings because the prospecting wasn't being done, and so everything just needs to be running asynchronously all at once.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, being a founder who's driving sales, capital raise in the business gets really, really difficult and you have to get really really good at managing your time. Otherwise that's exactly what happens. All of a sudden, you go through a pipeline in the course of a quarter, you finish it and you're like, oh my God, I don't have anything for next quarter.

Speaker 1:

How do you think about leveraging AI in these efforts when it comes to sales, in these efforts when it comes to sales?

Speaker 2:

So I mentioned, we're AI from day one. It was really on the back end of things. Our job was to accelerate professional production and then, about six or eight months into it, openai came out and we started using those AI tools internally. We're a Microsoft Founders Hub member, so we had access to all this Azure OpenAI stuff before most people did, and we started playing with it and testing it, and what we found is we actually were able to create efficiencies in our own company. I'll give you a really good example Our marketing videos, or our explainer videos. Two teams work on those. Our production team works on those and marketing works on those.

Speaker 2:

So what we were doing is we were using AI to create the scripts and then we were actually converting those scripts into social media posts and blogs and everything that marketing needed, and we were doing them so effectively and so quickly that we said, hey, we should externalize this as part of our platform, because if we're getting this much utility out of it, imagine what our customers could do. And so one of the tools that we have now called the Creative Copilot, which we're actually going to do an announcement on next week, is it's Promptless AI, where you start with, hey, what's the story I want to tell, and you create that script and then with a tap of a button you convert that into a voiceover and a shot list. So you've done all your pre-production as a marketer or an HR person literally within minutes, and now you can go tell that story visually, put it into Lucy Hub and we'll turn your video around the next day. So something that would have taken you two to three weeks minimum to do you can do in two to three days now. So that's kind of how we've done it on our front, on our platform and as a company. I think we've delivered for our internal use about 100 videos this year already, in addition to all the client videos we're delivering. So that's one way we're using it to accelerate things. We're also using it on the back end, on the demand gen side of it.

Speaker 2:

Our head of marketing is doing some stuff with AI. There I'm closer to the production stuff because that's what I work on with the engineering team, but it's literally all over our company. We're really we're a lot more efficient with those tools and I actually think entrepreneurs are going to do better than anybody with AI because it's going to give them the ability to scale with a fraction of the team they would need. And as a startup, it's going to give them the ability to scale with a fraction of the team they would need. And as a startup, it's hard to raise capital. It's hard to find people to buy into your vision and come join the team. There's a lot of challenges with this. It's really hard and I think AI gives us a little bit more of an advantage to a success rate.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I feel like we're the demographic that is least afraid of jumping into new things and just rolling up our sleeves and figuring it out. And you know, there's so many new tools that are part of my sort of daily just work ritual now that didn't even exist six months ago and sure, some of them some of them aren't great Like. There's definitely some that I've started to use and I'm like this is not helpful. But then there's others where now it's a part of, like my, my everyday tool set.

Speaker 2:

Well, and the other part of it is I don't. You know, as a company, we don't rely a hundred percent on AI. We are people plus AI and I think you know I say this all the time. What we do, which is it's a creative space, is subjective and no tech is going to take you 100% there. I'll give you a really good example. We have a product in the works right now. So, you know, everybody's doing podcasts and the real value of a podcast isn't necessarily the podcast, it's the cutdowns that you put on social media to get engagement and all of that.

Speaker 1:

Pain in the ass to do right now Right.

Speaker 2:

Most people are using an AI tool to do a hundred percent cut down, which just doesn't make sense. The AI tool doesn't know where to cut these pieces together. So we've been testing a tool that you could take your podcast brand and you could upload it to Lucy hub. It'll pull out the transcript for you and you'll be able to say give me this one at one minute and eight seconds. Cut it to three minutes and 15 seconds. Cut it to 25 minutes. They'll do the stitch for you automatically and then you can push it into our cloud, or our editors can add B-roll or whatever they want to clean it up with, but you'll be able to do these cutdowns literally within minutes now, and they're not just AI-based cutdowns. Yes, we're using AI, but you're the ultimate decision maker on what's going to get used.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, because I've tried. Even Riverside has some of those AI cutdowns, but they're not to the level that is needed for me to then go release them, and so it's cool in concept, but I still need to go find the person or the team that's going to take that and make it something that is production worthy and can be published, and so there's really that missing component of the people. You know, having somebody that comes in, cleans it up and polishes it in a way that can actually be presented.

Speaker 2:

So we'll have that for you in a couple of months. You can start using it. I'll be a beta tester. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

I am looking forward to just trying it out in general, though, because you, you know, as we, as we come up for launch here the week of December 2nd, there's so many applications for for video that we need across the board, from explainers to you know, just general. You know the conference as an example. You know there's three of us there. We're a small startup, we don't have a video production team and we had an iphone shooting videos, shooting images. The pictures are what made it on linkedin. The videos didn't, because we don't have, you know, the firepower to turn that into something that is worthy of being published. So, you know, I feel like there's so many businesses out there that are listening to this and, just in general, that that can benefit from from drawing it out, we were at a conference in Columbus, ohio, last week called Attune.

Speaker 2:

The conference ended on Friday. They just uploaded their Lucy Hub video on LinkedIn this morning and they got a lot of good feedback on it. But your conference you three could have filmed, uploaded and we could have had the video for you the next day.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your insights and I am very much so looking forward to trying out this tool. But before we hop, can you let folks know who are listening, where they could connect with you or Lucy Hub online.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you can. So lucyhubcom is the URL for our website and you can find all kinds of cool things there. One of the real cool things on that website is the Lucy Hub Academy. We've created a whole video library of micro lessons on how to become a great filmer using a smartphone and maybe just a lavalier or a ring light, so there's a bunch of really cool free content on there for anybody who wants to be a filmmaker with a phone and get things done down and dirty and actually make it look really, really positive. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm amert A-M-E-R-T at LinkedIn and on Instagram I'm atdrums because I'm a drummer.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I love that. Well, again, thank you for joining us. For everybody that's listening, as always, this is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom and Scalessai. Thanks for listening and we will see you next time. Thanks.